[CS-FSLUG] [OT] USB Hubs; Gigabit Networking

[Nathan T.]

Hey everyone,

I was hoping for some feedback on something. I had two USB hubs that  
had power supplies, one was an IOGear with integrated card reader and  
7 ports, and the other was a smaller Cicero with only 4 ports. I had  
the Cicero one on top, and just yesterday the IOGear one began  
getting sketchy. I've been thinking about what might have happened  
and the only thing that comes to mind is that the Cicero one was hot  
all over, and the IOGear one was hot on top yesterday, today they  
were both fairly cool, but the IOGear one had the two USB ports on  
the front completely dead, and the ports on the back would cut in and  
out. I fished it out and it's now heading for the garbage, but I  
suspect it was the other one heating up that killed it. Since then I  
haven't found the Cicero one getting hot, but I'm thinking of  
replacing it anyway because USB hubs are fairly cheap now, and I  
think that was the one overheating. Has anyone had a USB hub get hot  
enough to do hardware damage before? I must admit this is cause for  
concern.

I've also got a question, It's been quite in here so I don't see any  
harm in asking. I was thinking of getting a Gigabit capable NAS. I  
have Gigabit support in my desktop, and I'd have to check and see if  
my Mac Mini has it; however, my router is limited to 10/100. I know  
that with the wireless standards the speed is limited by the slowest  
device on the network, if I were to use a gigabit switch would the  
router still cap the speed at 10/100? For those that might have some  
input to offer, I know D-Link is one of the more problematic brands,  
but they are also the only company I can find that offers a raid 1  
capable NAS at a reasonable price, so I'm considering getting a D- 
Link DNS-323. Does anyone in here use a NAS or that one in  
particular? I'm currently using a CP Technologies NAS enclosure, and  
I've found it to be much slower than a USB external Hard drive. The  
problem is that it's getting too expensive to have external hard  
drives and I just don't have the physical space. I'd like to be able  
to get a raid capable NAS enclosure that I can put my existing hard  
drives into. I don't want to set up a whole computer for this, those  
things are just too darn expensive, and the DNS-323 is supposed to be  
easy to rebuilt in case of a disk failure with the newest firmware  
(which fixes the rebuild problems the previous versions had). What  
kind of advice might I get here?

Nathan T.